2.6

Lexical differences among languages

Some reasons languages differ lexically

So far we have endowed our Lexies with an amazing capacity, one that to
date has only been found among human beings.
Over the generations, they can now invent a very large store of labels for
individuals and categories of things in the world (even categories of
things not in the world).
And, equally important, they can pass on this store of labels to their
children.

Now let's imagine various tribes of Lexies in different parts of the world
with no contact with each other.
Each tribe will experience a different environment, containing its own
potentially unique set of animals and plants and its own climate and geology.
Each tribe will invent words for the things in its environment that matter
to it, and we will naturally expect to find words for different things
in each tribe.
Modern languages also differ from each other in this way.
Amharic has a word
for hippopotamus because hippopotamuses are found in Ethiopia, but
Inuktitut does not
because hippopotamuses are not found (normally) in northern Canada.

We can also expect the cultures of the different tribes of Lexies to
differ.
This will result in several differences in their store of words.
First, certain naturally occurring things will become more important.
A tribe that makes pots out of clay will want a word for clay;
another tribe may not bother.
Second, as culture develops, there will be more and more cultural
artifacts, that is, objects produced by the members of the culture.
Naturally the tribe will want words for these as well, and if they
are not producing them, they will not have such words.
Finally, culture results in abstractions, concepts that do not represent
(physical) things in the world at all: political units,
social relationships, rituals, laws, and unseen forces.
These will vary a great deal in their details from tribe to tribe, and
we can expect these differences to be reflected in the words that
each tribe comes up with.

Culture and nouns

Modern languages also differ from each other in these ways.
Amharic has the word agelgil meaning a leather-covered
basket that Ethiopians used traditionally to carry prepared
food when they traveled.
Other languages don't have a word for this concept.
English now has the word nerd to refer to a particular kind of
person who is fascinated with technology and lacking in social skills.
This is a relatively new concept, specific to certain cultures,
and there is probably no word for it in most languages.

Differences within and among languages

Languages such as English, Spanish, Mandarin Chinese, and Japanese have many specialized terms
for computers and their use, whereas many other languages, such as Tzeltal and Inuktitut,
do not. Does this represent some kind of fundamental limitation of
these languages?

Finally we can also expect the store of words to vary among the
individuals within each tribe.
As culture progresses, experts emerge, people who specialize in
agriculture or pottery or music or religion.
Each of these groups will invent words that are not known to everyone
in the tribe.
Modern languages also have this property.
A carpenter knows what a hasp is; I have no idea.
I know what a morpheme is because I'm a linguist, but I don't expect most
English speakers to know this.

This brings up an important distinction, that between the words that a language
has and the words that an individual speaker of the language knows.
Because some speakers of languages such as Mandarin Chinese,
English, Spanish, and Japanese have
traveled all over the world and studied the physical environments as well
as the cultures they have found, these languages have words for concepts
such as hippopotamus and polygamy, concepts that are not part of the
everyday life of speakers of these languages.
Thus it is almost certainly true that Mandarin Chinese,
English, Spanish, and Japanese have
more words than Amharic, Tzeltal, Lingala, and Inuktitut.
But this fact is of little interest to linguists and other language scientists, who,
if you remember,
are concerned with what individual people know about their language (and sometimes other languages) and how they use this knowledge.
There is no evidence that individual speakers of English or Japanese
know any more words than individual speakers of Amharic or Tzeltal.

Where new words come from

Furthermore, if a language is lacking a word for a particular concept,
it is a simple matter for the speakers of the language to add a new word
when they become familiar with the concept.
One way for this to happen is through semantic extension of an existing
word; we saw this earlier with
mouse in English.
Another way is to create a new word out of combinations of old words
or pieces of old words;
we will see how this works in
in Chapter 5 and
Chapter 8.
A third, very common, way is to simply borrow the word from another language.
Thus English speakers borrowed the word algebra from Arabic;
Japanese speakers borrowed their word for 'bread', pan, from
Portuguese;
Amharic speakers borrowed their word for 'automobile',
mekina, from Italian; and
Lingala speakers borrowed their word for 'chair', kiti, from Swahili.

What are the differences between the personal pronouns
you and you guys?
(There are at least two differences.)

More interesting than isolated differences in the words that are available
in different languages is how the concepts within a particular domain
are conveyed in different languages.
We'll consider two examples here, personal pronouns and nouns for kinship
relations;
we'll look at others later on when we discuss words for relations.

A complete set of
personal pronouns in my dialect
of English includes the
following: I, me, you, she, her,
he, him, it, we, us, you guys,
they, them.
Note that I'm writing you guys as two words, but in most important
ways it behaves like one word.
For our present purposes, we can ignore the following group:
me, her, him, us, them;
we're not really ready to discuss how they differ from the others.
Among the ones that are left, let's consider how they differ from each other.
We have already seen how they differ with respect to
person:
I and we are first person;
you and you guys are second person;
she, he, it, and they are third person.
We can view person as a
dimension, a kind of scale
along which concepts can vary.
Each concept that varies along the dimension has a
value for that dimension.
The person dimension has only three possible values, first, second, and
third, and each personal pronoun has one of these values.

Person is not just a conceptual dimension; it is a semantic dimension
because the different values are reflected in different linguistic forms.
That is, like words, semantic dimensions have both form and meaning.
When we speak of "person", we may be talking about form,
for example, the difference between the word forms I and you,
about meaning, for example, the difference between Speaker and Hearer,
or about the association between form and meaning.

But person alone is not enough to account for all of the differences among
the pronouns.
It does not distinguish I from we, for example.
These two words differ on another semantic dimension,
number.
I is
singular:
it refers to an individual.
We is
plural:
it refers to more than one individual.
What values are possible on the number dimension?
Of course languages have words for all of the different numbers,
but within the personal pronouns, there seem to be only the following
possibilities: singular, dual (two individuals), trial (three individuals),
and plural (unspecified multiple individuals).
Of these trial is very rare, and, among our set of nine languages,
dual is used only in Inuktitut.
Thus Inuktitut has three first person pronouns, uvanga 'I',
uvaguk 'we (two people)', uvagut 'we (more than two people)'.

Given the two dimensions of person and number, we can divide up the
English personal pronouns as shown in the table below.
The third person pronouns fall into the singular group of three,
she, he, and it, and the single plural pronoun
they.
The second person is more complicated.
In relatively formal speech and writing, we use you for both
singular and plural, but informally, at least in my dialect, we
may also use you guys for the plural.
(Note that other English dialects have other second person plural pronouns,
you all/y'all, yunz, etc.)
Thus we need to include both you and you guys in the plural
column.

sing.

plur.

1 pers.

I

we

2 pers.

you

you, you guys

3 pers.

she, he, it

they

Clearly we need more dimensions to distinguish the words
since two of the cells in our table contain more than one word.
Among the third person singular pronouns, the remaining difference
has to do with
gender, whether the referent
is being viewed as male, female, or neither.
Instead of male and female, I will use the conventional
linguistic terms
masculine and feminine to emphasize that we are
dealing with linguistic categories rather than biological categories
in the world, and for the third value I will use neuter.
Thus there are three possible values on the gender dimension for
English, and three seems to be all that is needed for other languages,
though some languages have a dimension similar to gender that has
many more values.

That leaves the distinction between you and you guys
in the plural.
As we have already seen, this is related to
formality, another semantic
dimension and a very complicated one.
I will have little to say about it here, except that it is related
to the larger context (not just the utterance context) and to the
relationship between the Speaker and Hearer.
For example, language is likely to be
relatively formal in the context of a public speech
or when people talk to their employers.
For now, let's assume that the formality dimension has only two values,
informal and formal.
The table below shows the breakdown of the English personal pronouns
along the four dimensions of person, number, gender, and formality.

sing.

plur.

1prs.

I

we

2prs.

you

form.

inform.

you

you guys

3prs.

fem.

masc.

neut.

she

he

it

they

Gaps in pronoun systems

Notice that there seem to be gaps in the English system.
There is a word for third person singular feminine, but no word
for second person singular feminine, and formality is only
relevant for second person plural.
Because there is no masculine or feminine you in English, we can say
that you is unspecified for the gender dimension.
As we will see many times in the book, languages tend to be systematic
— if they make a distinction somewhere, they tend to make that
distinction elsewhere — but they are not always so.
English personal pronouns are systematic in one important way:
the distinction between first, second, and third person is maintained
in both singular and plural.
But they are not in other ways, as we have just seen.

You will probably not be surprised to learn that there is nothing
special about the English system;
other languages organize things somewhat differently, though
it seems that person and number are relevant for all languages.
Here is the set of Amharic
personal pronouns.

sing.

plur.

1prs.

iné

innya

2prs.

plain

resp.

fem.

masc.

anči

ante

irswo

innante

3prs.

plain

resp.

fem.

masc.

isswa

issu

issaccew

innessu

Notice that Amharic fills some of the apparent gaps that English has;
for example, there is both a masculine and a feminine second person
singular pronoun, while English only makes the gender distinction
in third person.
But Amharic is unsystematic in some ways too; while gender is relevant for singular
pronouns, it is not for plural pronouns, and, as in English, it doesn't
enter into first person at all.
Notice also that there is a new dimension,
respect, that is relevant for
Amharic pronouns, at least in second and third person singular.
Respect is similar to formality, but it relates specifically to the
attitude that the Speaker wants to convey toward the referent,
that is, the Hearer in the case of second person and another person in the case of
third person.
In Amharic, there are two values for this dimension, plain and respectful.
Finally, notice that while English has three values for gender, Amharic has
only two, masculine and feminine.
This means that one or the other of these must make do to refer to things that are neither male nor female.
Many languages have only two genders, and each of these languages has its own way of
determining which gender is appropriate for things that don't have "natural" gender.

We have seen only two examples of personal pronoun systems.
Other languages have quite different systems, some making use of dimensions
that are not relevant for English or Amharic, some ignoring dimensions that
matter for English and Amharic.
For example, in many languages,
including Tzeltal and
Inuktitut,
gender plays no role at all in the personal pronoun systems: there is
no distinction like that between he and she.
It is not clear why pronoun systems vary the way they do.
For example, it would be wrong to assume that Tzeltal pronouns lack gender
because Tzeltal speakers are less conscious of gender in the world or that
children learning Tzeltal become less sensitive to gender differences than
children learning English or Amharic or Spanish.
At least there is no evidence for these kinds of relationships.
The relationship between language and thought has been most often studied in
the context of grammar, and since we are looking at personal pronouns, we
are getting pretty close to grammar, but we will save this topic for
later.

Lexical domains: kinship terms

What do the meanings of the words father and uncle have
in common?
What sort of dimension would you need to distinguish the meanings of
these words?

Now let's look at the words we use to refer to kinship relations.
We won't consider all of the words in a given language, just some of the
basic ones.
Let's start by taking two similar words and trying to figure out what
dimension distinguishes their meanings, say
brother and sister.
This is easy since we've already been discussing this dimension; it's
gender.

But gender won't help us with the distinction between daughter and mother since both are female.
For these words we have to consider their relationship to the person who provides
the reference point for the relationship, what cultural
anthropologists (the experts on this topic) call ego.
In both cases, there is a direct relationship (what anthropologists
call lineal), but in one case the relationship
goes in one direction (back into the past); in the other, it goes in the opposite
direction (forward into the future).
Let's call this dimension "vertical separation from ego".
We can use positive and negative numbers to represent values on this dimension.
In the case of mother, the separation is -1 (one generation back); in the
case of daughter, it is +1 (one generation forward).

But these two dimensions won't suffice to distinguish all basic English kinship
terms.
What about mother and aunt?
Both are female, and both are separated by -1 from ego.
What distinguishes these two relations is the closeness of the relationship
to ego.
For mother, the person is in a lineal relation to ego.
For aunt, we need to go back another generation, to ego's grandparents,
to find a common ancestor.
We will call this dimension
"horizontal distance from ego" and represent it again with a number
(but no sign).
For mother, we will say the distance is 0; for aunt (and
cousin and niece), it is 1.
Here is a list of some English kinship terms with their values on the
three dimensions.
If a cell is left blank, the dimension is unspecified for that term.

vert.

horz.

gend.

mother

-1

0

fem.

daughter

+1

0

fem.

sister

0

1

fem.

aunt

-1

1

fem.

parent

-1

0

grandchild

+2

0

niece

+1

1

fem.

cousin

0

2

Not all languages have "aunts" and "uncles"

Now let's look at some of the terms that Lingala speakers use for
kinship terms.
Some of these are just like English, but others require different
dimensions than are required for English.
Lingala speakers use different words for siblings that are older or younger
than ego and for aunts and uncles that are older or younger than
their parents, but they don't normally distinguish siblings or aunts
and uncles by gender.
We'll refer to this as the "relative age" dimension.
Lingala speakers also distinguish maternal and paternal aunts and uncles;
we'll call this the "parent path" dimension.
Finally, Lingala speakers use the same words for grandparents and
grandchildren; that is, at least some of the time they are concerned
only with vertical distance, not vertical direction (earlier or later).
The table below shows values on the kinship dimensions for some
Lingala kinship terms.

vert.

horz.

gend.

par.

age

mama'mother'

-1

0

fem.

mat.

tata'father'

-1

0

mas.

pat.

nkoko'grandparent/grandchild'

2(+/-)

0

nkulutu'older sibling'

0

1

older

leki'younger sibling'

0

1

younger

mama-nkulutu'older sibling
of mother'

-1

1

mat.

older

tata-leki'younger sibling
of father'

-1

1

pat.

younger

Differences in kinship terms are more likely to be related to culture
than differences in personal pronouns.
That is, when a single term (such as Lingala nkulutu 'older sibling')
groups different relatives together, we might expect that in the culture
where the language is spoken, those relatives are treated similarly by
ego.
(I don't know whether this is the case for Lingala speakers, however.)
Words refer to categories, after all, and categories are a way in which
people group the things in the world.
Children growing up in a particular culture are learning the cultural
concepts and the words simultaneously.
Their experience with the culture should help them learn the words referring
to cultural concepts, and their exposure to the words should help them
learn the concepts.
But little is actually known about how this sort of interaction works.
In the next section we'll consider the learning of the meanings of
apparently simpler nouns, those referring to physical objects.
Even here we'll discover that there is considerable disagreement on
how babies manage to master the words.